Simple Ways to Reduce Tardiness in the Workplace

The old saying stipulates that “time is money” and bearing this in mind, there can never be room for any tardiness in the workplace. In fact, to put it bluntly, if one person is ten minutes late every day – they will rack up one week’s worth of holiday over a year. Punctuality and deadlines are so crucial to many companies that some are even arranging for their employees to visit time management courses. Last year, my boyfriend was one of the lucky few sent on one of these (all of his co-workers were also given the opportunity, let me add) and while he did report back saying that he learned plenty of things, the fact that it generally costs several hundred pounds per attendee means that this is completely out of reach for most businesses. Therefore, it might be worth trying some of the following strategies to reduce tardiness in your workplace.

Start All Meetings Promptly

By starting all meetings at the exact time they are supposed to, employees have absolutely no reason to arrive late. If there is a culture within the company that suggests that meetings are constantly starting late, there is much more of a chance that employees will put much less significance on arriving on time. If they know that they will be forced to walk in midway through, it’s a completely different story.

Provide Employees with a Meeting Agenda

Similarly, any employee who is due to attend the meeting should be provided with an agenda detailing the location and time of the discussion. This means there are no excuses for lateness and employees can at least build the rest of their day’s activities around the meeting.

Unfortunately, if things are getting serious, it might be advisable to install a clock-in system to the office. Admittedly, this will only solve the problem of arriving to work late and won’t have any impact on meeting punctuality. Nevertheless, many companies are reaping the rewards from a system as employees feel under much more pressure to arrive on time to work if their activity is being logged. Moreover, if it is clear to see that certain employees are constantly arriving late, it is easy to initiate disciplinary action. Of course, this should be one of the last steps.

Adjust Working Hours

For those looking for a more communicative solution, it might be an idea to discuss the situation with the employee directly. If a person is constantly late, there could be a very good reason such as taking the kids to school or other personal issues. If this is the case, it might be worth sitting down and discussing different working hours which would correlate better with their personal life.

Punctuality and time management are some of the most important issues that can be instilled within a company. To combat these points, a lot of firms are now turning to conduct meetings with a conference call, which can save them a huge amount of time that would normally be wasted on travelling.